Google’s Street View project to map the world by taking pictures from passing cars ignited a minor uproar in northern Thailand where villagers detained a driver and made him swear on a Buddha statue that he was not surveying the area for an unwanted dam project. Villagers in Phrae province have now apologised for mistaking the Google worker for a government snoop.

Most Southeast Asian stocks edged slightly higher today amid selective buying in a thin market, with an anti-government rally in Bangkok capping the Thai benchmark and sending the baht to a one-month low.

The SET index traded nearly unchanged around the 1,428 level, with trading volume falling to around 30 per cent of the full-day average over the past 30 sessions. The market has been range-bound since late last week over political worries.

The wrinkled limestone karst landscape of the Thai-Burmese border is home to around 130,000 Burmese refugees. Many who fled decades of ethnic conflict have lost their lands, families and livelihoods, and countless children born in makeshift camps have neither set foot in the country of their parents’ birth nor speak their parents’ native tongue. While recent reforms in military-dominated Burma, officially known as Myanmar, have seen democracy icon Aung